Producing Open Source Software

What Hacker News says

1. pabs3Feb 2025
   Start by figuring out how to build the project and locally run what you just built. Once you can do that, you can make simple changes like fixing typos, and move up from there. If there is a guide for contributors, read through that too.

   There is lots of documentation about OSS out there too, for eg:

   https://producingoss.com/

   If you want to get paid to work in OSS, check out FOSSjobs and their wiki. If you want to get paid to work on OSS web browsers in particular, Igalia is the place to look at, especially their coding experience internships.

   https://www.fossjobs.net/ https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources https://www.igalia.com/coding-experience/ https://www.azabani.com/2020/09/27/my-internship-with-igalia...

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2. kragenDec 2023
   hi fazal!

   i mostly agree, and certainly didn't mean to slight darcs, bazaar and mercurial; darcs in particular was my version tracker of choice before switching to git

   but i think 'the needs of Open Source collaboration' are somewhat more plastic and historically contingent than you imply. if you read producing open source software you'll see a snapshot of the dominant social practices of open source collaboration in the world git and bazaar were born into (which of course you also experienced, but others reading this comment may not have). those practices still survive in places, like netbsd and debian

   arch, git, and family were designed to support a different set of social practices, practices that were at the time marginal in part because of the practical difficulty of applying them without software support. tom lord's radical program was to change the software landscape on which open-source collaboration happened in order to make those social practices viable

   i agree that globally sequential revision numbers are incompatible with decentralization in the pre-nakamoto world, because they demand consensus, and decentralized consensus was infeasible until nakamoto. it's still probably too costly for this purpose

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3. MattJ100Mar 2023
   Snap! 2007 was my year too, and yes, it really sparked everything for me.

   Very new to the community, my accepted GSoC project was adding some features to an XMPP library. I discovered recently that this library is in use by the Zoom desktop client.

   Now, 15 years later, I'm the Executive Director of the XMPP Standards Foundation and our organization is still participating in Google Summer of Code. It's great to have new people in the community, especially the ones for who GSoC is that same spark it was for me and many others, and the ones who stick around long after GSoC ends.

   GSoC 2007 was also the year they gave us Karl Fogel's Producing Open-source Software book (he managed to sign every copy!). This amazing instruction manual, combined with the GSoC experience, gave me the confidence to launch my own open-source projects (such as the XMPP server software that powers things such as Jitsi Meet).

   I'm really glad that the GSoC programme continues, and hope it will deliver the same kind of impact for new generations of developers and open-source projects.

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4. westiSep 2022
   The Mythical Man Month - important lessons for any developer

   Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life - A really good read on how to write which is applicable to everyone who needs to communicate well

   Producing Open Source Software - This is such an in depth book into everything you need to consider when working “in public”

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5. mindcrimeMar 2022
   Neither is super up to date, but these should cover the important stuff:

   - Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing[1]

   - Open Source Licensing[2]

   And then Producing OSS[3] also contains a (very) brief section on choosing a license. It's worth reading though, for other reasons.

   [1]: https://people.debian.org/~dktrkranz/legal/Understanding%20O...

   [2]: https://www.rosenlaw.com/oslbook.htm

   [3]: https://producingoss.com/en/producingoss-letter.pdf

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6. emacsenAug 2021
   My only suggestion right now mitght be to read my friend Karl's book. "Producing Open Source Software", which has a bunch on community.

   Or Jono Bacon's book "The Art of Community" is also good.

   One thing you may find, sadly, is that with SOO many projects out there, yours might not get a lot of fellow developers.

   But this sounds like a wonderful idea for a project!

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